The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Saturday, April 01, 2017

Ratf*ck A Go Go! Atlanticists and MI5 Go After Trump!

I try to keep a certain distance from the anti-Trump
circus.But I do want to put some
thoughts on record, given the obsession with Trump’s Russia connection and what
I see is a determined effort to minimize the British/NATO angle in the attack
on Trump.

My personal feeling is that there are significant swaths of
the European establishment that derive their mission and meaning from serving
as allies to the United States in an anti-Trump effort: the British government
and intelligence services, NATO, various right-leaning European governments, their
think tanks, in other words, the Atlanticists.

They didn’t like Trump because he was more interested in
dealing directly and positively with Russia on matters of US strategic concern in the Middle East and Asia and
much less interested in perfecting the Atlanticist Euro-centric anti-Russian containment/deterrence
apparatus and backing crazy EU/NATO expansion stunts like the Ukraine
operation.

Perhaps similar to Trump’s interest in dealing with China
instead of doing pivot.Difference is,
Atlanticist lobby is much more entrenched in Washington, the NATO alliance is
miles ahead of the “box of sand” Asian containment network, and Great Britain
is America’s primary intelligence partner.

So I think people over the pond, particularly in Europe,
were interested in feeding documentation on Trump’s murky Russia connections to his
opponents, and especially on behalf of Hillary Clinton, who is very much an
Atlanticist fave.Effort was pretty low
key at first because nobody expected Trump to get anywhere, but things picked
up when he got the nomination, and then shifted into apesh*t crazytime when he
got the presidency.

The British link is there for all to see in the notorious
Steele dossier.What people don’t want
to see is the inference that Steele was either getting dirt from MI5/GCHQ or is
simply a cut-out for a British effort.

I should say the possibility that the UK intelligence
service may have been deeply involved in preparing the brief against Trump does
not elicit an urge from me to spontaneously genuflect concerning the accuracy
of the evidence.I daresay psyops—packaging
and releasing selective intel and innuendo at opportune times through deniable
channels for maximum effect--is a core mission of British spookdom, as is
making up utter crap, like the notorious “dodgy dossier” on Saddam Hussein.

An interesting datapoint is the Guardian leg-humping
a story about Michael Flynn having conversations with a Russian-English
historian causing “concern” to “US and UK officials”.The
only useful conclusion from this farrago, as far as I can tell, is that a)
investigating Things Flynn was an official US-UK joint and not just Christopher
Steele lunching Russian emigres in Grosvenor Square and b) the UK press is
doing a similar tag teaming with US media to sell Trump/Russia like it pitched
in with the US to sell Saddam/Iraq.

And the Guardian is doing it this time!You’ve come a long way, baby!

The mega-uproar over the “GCHQ tapped Trump” story was, to
me, quite interesting, for the massive full-court pushback it elicited and the grudging
backdown from the Trump administration.

If the story proved out true, it would be a disaster for the
UK.

On the institutional level, confirmation that US
investigatory and intel outfits resorted to GCHQ to, shall we say, supplement collection
related to US citizens and *ahem* circumvent US laws would lead to demands for that
bane of all spook prerogatives, oversight and perhaps a committee to review
requests for intel exchange between the US and GCHQ before they happened (I
recall reading that currently the NSA can reach into Five Eyes servers and pull
out whatever it wants whenever it wants; it would be fun to find out in open
testimony if that actually happens!).

On the political level, it would be hard to escape the
imputation that Great Britain was conducting politically-motivated
collection/querying/handover of intel concerning disfavored US politicians and
officials, and that the English bulldog was INTERFERING IN AMERICA’S SACRED
ELECTIONS, you know, like a certain country, name begins with R ends with A led
by a guy name begins with P ends with N is allegedly doing.

It would be interesting to see how the public relations fracas
on terms of “Putin trolls pushed fake news on Facebook” vs. “GCHQ pushed fake
news into the FBI” would play.

GCHQ/MI5’s powerful capabilities and their slavish eagerness
to put them at the service of the US are the glittering jewels in the tattered collar
of the British poodle.If GCHQ becomes a
“normal” intelligence interlocutor of the US—with the added stigma of having
engaged in politicized active measures on behalf of US factions—then the UK
risks dropping to parity with *gasp* Germany as another arm’s length partner.

Fox’s alacrity in yanking some guy called “Judge Nap” for
publicizing the GCHQ surveillance allegations was interesting.You might expect Fox would be keen to push
this rather provocative and open-ended talking point to provide some aid and
comfort to Trump and ride a ratings-boosting angle.But Fox shut Nap down!

Wonder if Rupert Murdoch got the call from the UK government
that any encouragement of this kind of tittle-tattle would call down the wrath
of the British government on Rupert’s extensive media holdings in Britain.

Well, with Judge Nap in the cooler, I doubt any other Fox
commentators will be too interested in pursuing that allegation.

And maybe the US intel community told Trump he’d be gone in
a heartbeat if he threatened to compromise the US-GB special spook relationship
to save his skin.So he backed off.

If Trump falls on his ass I expect that will provide the
political cover for some discrete “now it can be told” bragging about how the
Atlanticist band of brothers joined hands to defeat the Russian menace.If Trump hangs on, it just goes into the
secret museum of US-UK ratf*cking operations.

7 comments:

The statement from GCHQ was a giveaway."Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct 'wiretapping' against the then president elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored." "...about GCHQ being asked to..." translates to one of the following:1. We were already doing it, so there was no need to ask.2. We volunteered to do because we knew there were "elements" in Washington that needed our "help".3. We were ordered to do it.I suspect it was 1 - GCHQ were already monitoring elements within the Moscow establishment when certain Americans contacted them and they felt certain organizations in Washington would be interested. This most likely included the White House and explains why Obama greatly expanded the distribution of very sensitive information in the dying days of his presidency. By doing so he shut down supposedly valuable sources of intelligence because the Russians now have a clearer picture of GCHQs operations against Russia and are probably cleaning up right now. I'm disappointed but not surprised that no-one's pointed out the damage that Obama has done to western intelligence gathering capabilities for obviously political motives.The part in the GCHQ statement about "...conduct 'wiretapping' against the then president elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.", can be interpreted as "don't be ridiculous, wiretapping is soooooo last century, we have far better ways of doing it now", but far more likely means that GCHQ had a tap but nowhere near Trump Towers that happened to pick up communications involving Trump's election team and other associates.Was this some nefarious scheme to bring down Trump? I don't think so because the consequences of being caught are too damaging and as soon as Washington is involved, leaks become inevitable. More likely GCHQ were monitoring some Russians, some Americans communicated with them and some jobsworth followed his standing orders and forwarded the information to certain organizations in Washington without thinking about or understanding the consequences. The Americans then picked up on it and away they went...